What Kind of Job Is That for a Nice Jewish Boy?

In the 1950s and early 1960s, American Jews wrestled with new models of masculinity that their new economic position enabled. For many American Jewish novelists, intellectuals, and clergy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the communal pressure on Jewish men to become middle-class breadwinners betrayed older, more Jewishly-authentic, notions of appropriate masculinity. Their writing promoted alternative, Jewish masculine ideals such as the impoverished scholar and the self-sacrificing soldier, crafting a profoundly gendered critique of Jewish upward mobility.

What Now Supports Jewish Liberalism?

In the years after World War II, many liberal and left-leaning Jewish leaders expressed concern that American Jews would adopt conservative political values as the result of their economic rise. While there is little evidence to prove that Jewish upward mobility led directly to conservative political values, this fear of a rightward political shift continued to circulate. To the left-leaning leaders of postwar American Jews, this move toward Jewish conservatism – a shift that they saw as an inevitable consequence of Jewish upward mobility -- represented a betrayal of “authentic” Jewish values that were forged out of historical Jewish experiences of social and economic marginality.

Hadassah Makes You Important

During the postwar years, American Jewish women received contradictory advice over how they ought to conduct their lives as they entered the middle-class. As Jewish men felt pressure to become breadwinners, the mores of the middle-class stipulated that married women limit their interests to the needs of home and family. Some Jewish leaders supported these middle-class gender ideologies and warned Jewish women against spending too much time away from domestic responsibilities; others encouraged Jewish women to defy postwar gender norms and engage fully and deeply in the public sphere. Significantly, both those leaders who believed that Jewish women needed to contributed to the world outside their homes and those who feared that they were spending too much time away from their families all tended to agree that the rising affluence of American Jews posed a threat to Jewish women and the Jewish families they were supposed to be raising.

Conclusion

By and large, during the postwar years, Jewish resistance to middle-class norms took the form of verbal and written warnings that did not translate to concrete change. The gap between the widespread denigration of middle-class Jewish life and the minimal attempts to create alternatives to it represents more than just a quirk of postwar American Jewish history. Instead, these critiques of Jewish upward mobility comprised, in and of themselves, a crucial means by which American Jews adapted to prosperity and social acceptance, and an important means by which Jews, and especially their leaders, articulated their difference from other middle-class Americans. Significantly, this manner of asserting their Jewishness did not jeopardize the social and economic security that this new status afforded them. Even so, this continued tendency among middle-class American Jews to identify with histories of poverty and marginalization has continued to influence Jewish political investments and ideologies well into the contemporary moment.

Pathfinders’ Predicament

This chapter details the widespread communal discomfort surrounding the religious practices of upwardly-mobile American Jews in the decades after World War II, paying particular attention to how Congregation Solel – a suburban synagogue whose members considered themselves to be particularly intellectual, politically-oriented, and critical of the American middle-class -- responded to these concerns. While most postwar American synagogues did not follow Solel in steeling themselves against the normative patterns of middle-class Jewish congregational life, the anxieties articulated by the members of Solel reverberated widely among postwar Jews and especially among the rabbinic leadership. Long-accustomed to thinking of social exclusion and economic need as integral components of a genuine Jewish identity, postwar rabbis did not necessarily feel comfortable with an emergent American Judaism that reflected acceptance and affluence.

Materially Poor, Spiritually Rich

As the fortunes and social status of American Jews grew in the years after World War II, the symbolic power of the shtetl, the immigrant slum, and the struggling new state of Israel gained in importance. Jewish writers, educators, and clergy depicted these locations as deeply authentic Jewish spaces, uncorrupted by the influence and comforts of the non-Jewish world. Isolated rather than integrated, impoverished rather than affluent, they seemed to represent the opposite of mid-century American Jewish life. In the romantic imagination of American Jewish leaders, the deprivations suffered by their ancestors and co-religionists transformed into sources of pleasure, strength, and Jewish authenticity, and poverty and isolation emerged as integral components of a genuine and deeply satisfying Jewish identity.

Introduction

In a 1954 article for Commentary magazine, Sylvia Rothchild, writing under the pseudonym Evelyn Rossman, expressed her dissatisfaction with synagogue services in postwar America. “If the service reminded me of the little shul [synagogue] my father went to, I was sad because I remembered how shabby and poor it was,” she complained. “If I found a wealthy Conservative or Reform temple I sat there like a stranger thinking how insincere and hypocritical it all was. Weren’t all good Jews supposed to be poor?”...

From Generation to Generation

Beginning in the late 1960s, young Jewish radicals rejected the middle-class culture in which they had been raised, and attempted to reinvent American Jewish life in the spirit of the era’s global youth revolt. This Jewish counterculture organized multiple religious and political collectives and advanced a variety of causes, some of which overlapped and some of which actually contradicted with one another. The common denominator linking together all of these disparate undertakings, however, was a pointed critique of the middle-class Jewish culture that had been forged by the older generation of American Jews. Indeed, when members of the Jewish counterculture created narratives to justify their investments in such issues as the plight of Soviet Jewry; the inclusion of women, gays and lesbians in American Jewish life; Zionism; or the restructuring of American Judaism – none of which pertained directly to the class position of American Jews-- they often cited American Jewish affluence as not only relevant but fundamental to the problems they were trying to solve.